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Leo, Gerry and Myles Fitzgerald all play for Victoria of the BCHL, but they are perhaps known better for being the triplets who starred in the 1999 movie Baby Geniuses with Christopher Lloyd (a movie which has 1 whole star on IMDB I might add).

Now all three of them, all 1993 birthdates, have committed to play college hockey at Bemidji State. Gerry Fitzgerald has 23 goals and 41 points in 41 games, Leo Fitzgerald has 26 goals and 50 points in 54 games, and Myles outpaces both of them, scoring 30 goals (7th in the league) and 71 points in 52 games.

They’re all 19 and playing in the BCHL so take their numbers with a grain of salt, but they all pretty clearly look like D1 level players. I don’t think I have ever seen triplets in college hockey, and certainly haven’t seen triplets who were all actors, so that’s pretty cool. Hopefully their hockey careers earn them more praise than their movies did.

I mostly don’t touch recruiting here, but when said recruit is the cousin of actress (or “actress”?) Lindsay Lohan, I’ll make an exception.

6’5″ Kevin Lohan currently plays for Merritt in the BCHL, and at 6’5″ his best tool is his size. He has 14 points, including two game winning goals, in 40 games for the Centennials this year. He’s also played from coast to coast over the last three seasons, playing for Shattuck two years ago and then New York Apple Core (EJHL) before joining the BCHL this year.

Lohan is a ’93 so he has another year of junior eligibility remaining, and in a phone interview with the Michigan Daily he said he was unsure whether he would join Michigan in 2013 or 2014.

For the record, Red Berenson has apparently heard of Lindsay Lohan, but would not be able to recognize her. Though to be fair, everyone who saw her in Mean Girls would say the same thing if they saw her now.

For those who were wondering, Red Berenson has heard of Lindsay Lohan. Wouldn’t recognize her though.

The earth shattering part isn’t that it happened. It is the worst kept secret in amateur hockey that CHL teams do this all the time, with the most famous recent example probably being Kitchener reportedly offering Cam Fowler just under half a million dollars. That of course was the event that prompted the threat of a libel lawsuit from Windsor and Kitchener, one which never came for some strange reason (hint: truth is an absolute defense to libel).

What makes this a pretty monumental event is that there is a sourced report with an actual dollar amount being reported. I can’t say it any more eloquently than Chris Peters of the United States of Hockey when he tweeted “Can’t put the toothpaste in the tube now.”

I don’t see much changing in terms of actual events on the ice. Regardless of what happens to Kitchener (probably nothing, as they have denied any wrongdoing and it goes against the OHL’s interests to say that they did anything wrong) teams across the CHL will still pay for top talent. But it does change the perception a bit. Rather than being the “best development league in the world” more people will realize they are good at buying college bound players and letting the Taylor Hall’s of the world beat the league up before going to the NHL, while college hockey develops hockey players. And, obviously, if you have to bribe players to come play there it doesn’t scream “best development league” to me.

Seth Jones’s story is a fairly well known one among hockey fans: born to former NBAer Popeye Jones, Seth first picked up hockey while living in Denver, and honed his game playing youth hockey in Texas. The NTDPer has already spent two years with the program, and because he missed the NHL draft cutoff by just over a month he will have to spend his draft year somewhere else.

That place, he announced on twitter, is with the Portland Winterhawks of the WHL. Jones was taken by Everett in the first round of the WHL bantam draft in 2009, but had made it known that had he had the choice between reporting to Everett or playing college hockey, he was going to go to North Dakota. That allowed Everett to trade his rights to Portland, where Jones will spend his draft eligible year.

By all accounts, Jones should do quite well in Portland. He stands about 6’3″ and is a little over 200 pounds with room to get bigger. He skates tremendously well and can play well in his own zone plus has tremendous offensive upside. He’ll battle QMJHL forward Nathan MacKinnon in the race to be the #1 overall pick, and while I’d take MacKinnon because I tend to favor forwards, there’s no doubt that Jones is a potentially elite defenseman, and one of the best American prospects in quite some time.

Though this is a college hockey site, I think he probably made the correct call in choosing Portland. Though he could probably benefit from a college weight program, it probably does him better to go out and dominate young kids in the WHL and play in a ton of games before heading to the NHL than it would for him to struggle with the more physical aspects of college hockey (and I think it’s fair to say that an 18 year old, no matter how talented, would struggle physically playing against men). It’s important to reiterate, though, that Jones would fare well regardless of the path he chose. By all accounts he is as smart and humble and hardworking as he is talented. And his pre-decision actions, personally visiting Everett, Portland and Grand Forks before making his decision, certainly bear that out. This is one of the rare prospects that the college game will be worse off for not getting a chance to experience, but also one of the rare prospects whom you can’t blame for making the decision he did, even as biased as we college fans can be.